Bay Area Book Festival Podcast

Latest Episodes:

Black Feminist Futurescaping Jun 19, 2026

Show notes

"The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house" (Audre Lorde), but the tools that have been used for dismantling in the past might just be the ones we use to build the future. For Octavia Butler, science fiction stories were her tools for speculating the devolution of the American empire and simultaneously offered cautionary tales about our propensity for violence and sanguine manifestations that alter our current paradigms and envision Black women at the center of the world. In her cultural biography, Positive Obsession: The Life and Times of Octavia E. Butler, Black feminist Afrofuturist writer, scholar, and cultural critic Susana M. Morris places Butler's story within the historical and social contexts that influenced the ideas central to her celebrated writing. Similarly, in Survival Is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde, researcher Alexis Pauline Gumbs asks us to look beyond the surface of another iconic writer and symbol of Black feminism. Audre Lorde is well-known for her quotable essays, but Gumbs' groundbreaking research into the full depths of Lorde's manuscript archives reveal her deep engagement with the planetary dynamics of geology, meteorology, and biology. In a society that rejected her Black feminist lesbian warrior poet existence, these ecological images provided the literal guides for self-defense, for survival, and for writing the future. Moderated by Isis Asare of Sistah Scifi, the first Black-owned bookstore in the nation dedicated to science fiction, this panel will examine the environments that influenced the two visionary Black feminist writers and the wisdom their works provide for dismantling unjust realities as we create our own futures.

Introductory live music performance by selena feliciano (Bushwick Book Club Oakland).

This event took place in Downtown Berkeley, at the Bay Area Book Festival, May 29-31 2026.

Support our work and help to keep the Bay Area Book Festival 96% free! https://givebutter.com/writingthefuture

Check out our upcoming events www.baybookfest.org

From Colleagues to Courtship Indigenous Romance Jun 18, 2026

Show notes

Sometimes, being forced to work together on a project might not be so bad… especially when it leads to falling in love. At the Crooked Rock Urban Indian Center in Pamela Sanderson's Heartbeat Braves, Rayanne Larson's special project is unexpectedly handed over to the underachieving nephew of the Center's new leader, and she is determined to keep her distance until a crisis forces the two of them closer together. In Native Love Jams by Tashia Hart, Winnow is hired to cook for the first Indigenous Food Days in a rural Minnesota village, where she and her unwelcoming host Niigaanii must pull thorns from their past to harvest their own love story. Dani Trujillo's When Stars Have Teethtakes place in the San Francisco Urban Indian Center, where employee Buffy Yellowbird agrees on an associates-with-benefits arrangement with an ultra-suave immigration lawyer who leaves her longing for more. Emerging from a past abundant with problematic Indigenous tropes, the romance genre is greatly enriched by the novels of this panel, which showcase genre fiction created by authors who identify with the cultures represented. Moderated by the content creator behind publishing imprint Boozhoo Books Naomi Darling, this lovely panel celebrates Indigenous romance writing and the sparks that arise in partnership.

This event took place in Downtown Berkeley, at the Bay Area Book Festival, May 29-31 2026.

Support our work and help to keep the Bay Area Book Festival 96% free! https://givebutter.com/writingthefuture

Check out our upcoming events www.baybookfest.org

Building Worlds, Building Power Jun 18, 2026

Show notes

What happens when visionary worldbuilding meets movement building? In this rare and unmissable conversation, acclaimed novelist Nnedi Okorafor, whose Africanfuturist fiction reshapes the boundaries of speculative literature, sits down with legendary organizer Marshall Ganz, architect of modern grassroots leadership models. Guided by co-founder of Wakanda Dream Lab Calvin Williams, the conversation will travel across story and structure, imagination and power. Together, they will ask: How do the stories we tell determine the futures we fight for? How does organizing become a living narrative of hope and resistance? And how can collective imagination move us closer to liberation? This will be a gathering of minds that reminds us that crafting worlds and building movements are acts born of the same radical impulse: to dream together, and remake what has been made.

This event took place in Downtown Berkeley, at the Bay Area Book Festival, May 29-31 2026.

Support our work and help to keep the Bay Area Book Festival 96% free! https://givebutter.com/writingthefuture

Check out our upcoming events www.baybookfest.org

HILO PRESENTS THE MIGHTY Jun 17, 2026

Show notes

Cartoonist Judd Winick's presentation surrounding his latest title, HILO PRESENTS: THE MIGHTY, involves a 17 question Q&A with himself as the creator. From answering questions about his artistic process and the process behind creating a HILO book, to sharing innumerable photos of his two cats (Troy and Abed), Judd's session will cover not only his unique career in the graphic novels/comics space but will also answer burning questions a lot of kids may be already thinking of in the audience!

This event took place in Downtown Berkeley, at the Bay Area Book Festival, May 29-31 2026.

Support our work and help to keep the Bay Area Book Festival 96% free! https://givebutter.com/writingthefuture

Check out our upcoming events www.baybookfest.org

Shadows of Liberty: Immigrant Detention, Incarceration, and the Demand for Dignity in the USA Jun 17, 2026

Show notes

The Trump administration is terrorizing our communities with mass deportations, militarized raids, and brutal detainment, tearing families apart and unlawfully withholding immigrants in inhumane conditions. As historian Ana Raquel Minian points out, this is only the latest chapter in a saga in which immigrants to the United States have been held without recourse to their constitutional rights. This imperative panel will trace back to the 1800s with Minian's In the Shadow of Liberty: The Invisible History of Immigrant Detention in the United States, which braids together the vivid stories of four migrants seeking to escape the turmoil of their homeland for the promise of America: a Chinese refugee, a European war bride, a Cuban exile, and a Central American asylum seeker. Personal accounts give this history a human face, as with The Poet and the Silk Girl: A Memoir of Love, Imprisonment, and Protest,Satsuki Ina's memoir documenting her parents' forcible removal from their home, their incarceration in wartime American concentration camps, and the generational struggle of Japanese Americans who fought for the restoration of their rights and clung to their full humanity in the face of adversity. As she traces the legacies of trauma, she connects her family's ordeal to modern-day mass incarceration at the U.S.-Mexico border, which is what Daniel A. Olivas bases his modern retelling of "Waiting for Godot" on. Through a darkly comic absurdist lens, Waiting for Godínez: A Tragicomedy in Two Acts features the forever-waiting character Jesús, who is kidnapped by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents each night to be deported and thrown into a cage that is left unlocked. Though these "black sites" of rightlessness exist out of view from the average American, their reach extends into our lives, all the way to the gradual unraveling of the right to bail and the presumption of innocence. Veronica Granillo brings a lawyer's perspective from her experience working on affirmative and defensive asylum cases, U Visas, residency, and naturalization as the Senior Staff Attorney at East Bay Sanctuary Covenant, a community organization that provides services to support low-income immigrants and people fleeing violence and persecution. Moderated by Piper Kerman, justice reform activist and author of Orange is the New Black, the narratives of this panel allow us to see how the changing political climate surrounding immigration has played out in individual lives, imploring us to reconsider this country's policies in light of the fact that we are all human and deserve respect, dignity, and democracy as we make our way in this confusing and often indifferent world.

This event took place in Downtown Berkeley, at the Bay Area Book Festival, May 29-31 2026.

Support our work and help to keep the Bay Area Book Festival 96% free! https://givebutter.com/writingthefuture

Check out our upcoming events www.baybookfest.org

Civil Rights and Structural Attacks Jun 16, 2026

Show notes

Eighty years of lessons from the Black freedom struggle, labor movements, and internationalism illuminate the path forward in our fight for democracy and never-ending commitment to building a better world. In a multi-generational conversation, legendary Civil Rights organizer Walter Riley andcommunity organizer, musician, and journalist Jesse Strauss will offer insights from their book, Civil Rights and Structural Attacks, drawing parallels between past movements and present injustices. Raised among the entrails of chattel slavery in Durham, North Carolina, Riley brings decades of movement experience from mobilizations against Jim Crow apartheid laws, to student and labor organizing with early Black Panther formations, to organizing against South Africa's apartheid system as a criminal defense and civil rights lawyer. His more recent work involves supporting infrastructure for Haitian movement-building and confronting police violence in Oakland. Strauss is the co-creator of the first-ever daily abolitionist radio show Law & Disorder andan anti-imperialist and abolitionist cultural worker who was raised in Oakland and Berkeley (unceded Ohlone/Chochenyo land). He was also a producer for Al Jazeera during the so-called "Arab Spring" and "Occupy" movements, and together with Riley, they will reflect on the importance of political action as the primary venue for learning and reflection in this insightful and vital conversation moderated by writer, director, and musician Boots Riley.

This event took place in Downtown Berkeley, at the Bay Area Book Festival, May 29-31 2026.

Support our work and help to keep the Bay Area Book Festival 96% free! https://givebutter.com/writingthefuture

Check out our upcoming events www.baybookfest.org

Traveling the Pages of Indigenous Memoirs Jun 16, 2026

Show notes

Blurring the lines between journalism and memoir, the indigenous writers of this panel look outward at the people, cultures, and history around them to form a personal understanding of what it means to be a world citizen today. Terria Smith, who longed for adventure growing up on the Torres Martinez Reservation in Southern California, observed that travel is deeply rooted in Native traditions of reciprocity, risk-taking, bridging, and holding differences, but there remains a lack of Indigenous voices in the travel writing space. Her memoir, I Love You So Many, recounts Smith's stories from her ancestral homelands to Cuba, Iceland, and Guyana with humor and exuberance, an irresistible tribute to getting out and living a life in full. For journalist and Oscar-nominated filmmaker Julian Brave Noisecat, correcting the erasure, invisibility, and misconceptions surrounding the First Peoples of this land compelled him to travel across the continent. Translated from "tscwinúcw-k," a traditional Secwépemc morning greeting, We Survived the Night paints a portrait of contemporary Indigenous life by blending history, memoir, and reportage in the style of a "Coyote Story," a legend about the trickster who was revered for his wit and mocked for his tendency to self-destruct. Traverse the roads connecting past, present, and future with the authors of this dazzling panel, moderated by queer Indigenous artist, poet, and curator Viola LeBeau.

This event took place in Downtown Berkeley, at the Bay Area Book Festival, May 29-31 2026.

Support our work and help to keep the Bay Area Book Festival 96% free! https://givebutter.com/writingthefuture

Check out our upcoming events www.baybookfest.org

Mindful Democracy Jun 15, 2026

Show notes

Drawing on the expertise of mindfulness educators, frontline organizers, and America's greatest literary voices, this panel provides guidance for navigating political burnout and civic despair. On Mindful Democracy: A Declaration of Interdependence to Mend a Fractured World is professor Jeremy David Engels' compact guide offering 27 powerful teachings of interdependence and how to show up for democracy with compassion, clarity, and courage. In this age of disaster, community-shaped strategies are essential for practically navigating the challenges posed by overlapping catastrophes, and Kailea Rose Loften and Kate Rose Weiner present engaging prompts, concise checklists, and heartfelt advice for building and sustaining durable mutual aid networks in Compassion in Crisis: Building Disaster-Resilient Communities. Liza J. Rankow combines the compassion of a seasoned spiritual guide and the insightful analysis of a longtime grassroots activist in Soul Medicine for a Fractured World, which offers questions for reflection as well as an array of spiritual and healing practices to guide readers on an integrative path forward through healing and transformation, rooted in our kinship with one another, the Earth, and all of life. Diving deeply into a dharma of liberation, Rima Vesely-Flad examines the writings of Audre Lorde and James Baldwin through key Buddhist principles, revealing that liberation depends not only on organizing and mass movements, but also the generative power of inner well-being, authenticity, art, and embodiment. Whether you're a seasoned activist or a tender-hearted citizen seeking a new path forward, this nourishing panel moderated by Rev. Dereca Blackmon of the East Bay Church of Religious Science is an invitation into the lifelong work of caring for one another in pursuit of our collective liberation.

This event took place in Downtown Berkeley, at the Bay Area Book Festival, May 29-31 2026.

Support our work and help to keep the Bay Area Book Festival 96% free! https://givebutter.com/writingthefuture

Check out our upcoming events www.baybookfest.org

Library Joy with Mychal Threets! Jun 15, 2026

Show notes

Welcome to the library, the place where you will always belong! Join the Internet's favorite librarian and host of the relaunched Reading Rainbow Mychal Threets as he introduces his bright and exciting picture book, I'm So Happy You're Here: A Celebration of Library Joy. After a short read-aloud, Mychal and Supervising Librarian Shani B will talk about his experiences and inspiration for writing his book. Then, Samaya, Ash, and Miley—students from local public schools—will join the conversation about the sense of wonder and community that libraries nurture, and what library joy means to them. The possibilities are endless at a library, which has activities, movies, games, and so many stories! Make sure to bring your curious questions and fond library memories to share in this session, which will feature lots of Q&A time with Mychal and the amazing panelists. Whether you're a regular visitor or stepping into the stacks for the first time, we're so happy you're here with us for this interactive celebration of the joy that libraries bring!

This event took place in Downtown Berkeley, at the Bay Area Book Festival, May 29-31 2026.

Support our work and help to keep the Bay Area Book Festival 96% free! https://givebutter.com/writingthefuture

Check out our upcoming events www.baybookfest.org

Short Cuts: Bay Area Book Festival Week is Here! May 27, 2026

Show notes

BABF Short Cuts is a Podcast of the Bay Area Book Festival where we introduce some of the authors and partners who will join us for the 2026 Festival in Berkeley from May 29–May 31.

This episodes features three BABF staff members who describe some of the events coming up, what to expect onsite at the festival, and some tips and tricks on how to get the most out of a jam packed weekend!

You can find more 2026 festival authors and upcoming events at www.baybookfest.org.

Please support our work! https://givebutter.com/writingthefuture